It has been a while, sometimes I forget that I have a blog. Not that I have any followers, but it is nice to know there is place to put all my ramblings and crafts.

So I just finished the baby quilt for my Great Grand niece.

Now that makes me sound old, but really, the all just stated when they were young….really.

So this new member of the family is my sisters oldest daughters, daughters, daughter.

Or my nieces daughter had a baby. Which ever helps you figure out the connection.

I decided to make a baby quilt. I have been quilting more and more and really trying to do free motion quilting. Basically I am really bad at it, but one has to practice to learn to do this.

This is the little gem. The middle was a little bland so I added a little bird.

It was still bland so I added the embroidery. I swear the embroidery took longer than putting the quilt top together.

As you can see I did some stippling in the white area around the bird.

I then added some walking foot work.

Speaking of walking foot, the Craftsy class by Jacquie Gering is awesome. This is one of my favorite classes and has taught me so much. Especially since I was afraid to free motion, using the walking foot was less scary.

I added in some swirls and other designs. But please do not look closely at my work.

and finally I made a special tag

I finally mailed it off today, cannot wait for her to get it.

I also mailed a crochet baby blanket my Mother made. When she died I found a collection of baby blankets that she made. I decided to keep them and give them out to my families future generations. It means so much to know my Mom can still give the baby blankets to the new little ones.

Do any of you post your recipes as a way to keep from losing those darn little recipe cards. My recipe box is a mess. I have to search and search to find recipes in it.

So I have been putting them on my blog. Not only because I lose them, but my sister does also. She is always texting me asking me for a recipe. Yes, I am talking about you! Now all you have to do is go to my blog.

My Mom use to make a meatloaf that we loved. She would use tomato rice soup instead of catsup and we loved it.

I snagged the photo from the Country Cook so please click on it to go to their site. I am really bad at taking pictures of food when I am hungry. Hee Hee.

I have been missing for a while. Been busy quilting which I normally do not blog about, but will soon. I am trying to finish a Halloween quilt that I started 2 or 3 years ago. Or it could be 4 or 5 years ago.

I finished the piecing and now am quilting it. The big challenge is that I wanted to learn to do free motion, so part of my quilt was done with a walking foot and the other parts are free motion.

I basically suck at it, but it is a new skill so I just need to practice to get better. I actually do not mind doing this on an actual quilt versus a spare fat quarter. I am hoping it will be a reminder of where I started (that is if I get better).

On to Halloween!

I did my normal decorating, pumpkins that light up, spider webs, etc. I added a new bone spider, bone rat and and bone vulture.

I also like to get the big candy bars and be the cool house. But the last two years I have seen a trend where large groups of children come together. About 10-15 in a group. As you can image this wipes out the candy pretty fast and with that volume, I cannot even stop to see the costumes. I prefer the one or two children at a time deal. Of course the little boy next door showed up twice just like he did last year. I told him to stop doing that and I would run out of candy. LOL He could have least changed his costume or waited for a huge group and confuse me. Too funny!

Speaking of children, the last two children of the night wore this adorable NASA suits and you put the candy down the flexible silver tube (aka dryer exhaust hose) it drops into their air pack on their back. Sooooo cute.

This year I added two new items, an electric fence light that made “sparking” noises when you got near it.

I ended up putting it on the baby gate that I use in the doorway so the dogs do not get out when I answer the door.

The other goody I got was a short-circuit lab light bulb that fizzled in and out like one of those spooky haunted laboratories that mad scientists do human experiments! Eeekkk!!!!! This one is sold by Gemma in case you want one. I got mine at Wal-mart.

It has a little switch that you can either make it motion sensor or not. I liked it a lot. Made it real spooky.

I also dress up the dogs like a good dog mom. Doug resisted Eli getting dressed but I think he really thought he was cute.

He was a prisoner of Love.

It was a tad bit tight but he did just fine. The label on the back glows in the dark. I just love how it looked on his hind legs. So cute.

Olive was a dinosaur! A cute one I might add. Olive does real good with costumes.

You can see her costume better on the video below.

Penny on the other hand HATES costumes and sweaters. She is 100% dog and does not like that sort of thing.

She does make a cute little panda. Look at that panda tail on her back. So cute.

the Camp Farewell Bonfire

I had just did a shadow stamping card for my Tim Holtz class, so I was familiar with the technique.

I love Stephanie Klauck’s card, but I wanted more color to mine. So I decided to use Kraft cardstock and use multiple colors of ink.

For those who do not have the My Favorite Things Hybrid Stamp pads, I highly recommend them. The colors are so bright and the ink is so juicy. Sometimes I will get an ink pad and will be so disappointed that I can hardly get any color from them. These inks ROCK!!!!

To highlight the card, I embossed the secondary images in Liquid Platinum embossing powder.

You can see the embossing better in this highlight. I used the trick I learned in class about using a glue pen to make small dots and add embossing powder on it.

Stephanie Klauck again wowed me her cute card. I love how she tried to make the card look like a coloring book for children.

Very cute!

I ended up making a scene with the adorable lamb set. I probably could have used the little hearts coming from the jumping lamb but did not think of this until I was posting the picture.

As a side note. Do not wear a new blouse when using Copics. As luck would have it, I pulled out a copic and the lid got stuck in the case, I accidently dropped the capless copic marker on me and smeared dark green ink all over my blouse. I am sure if I was wearing some old shirt it would have never happened. Ugh!

Well I thought I had seen every trick in the book, but this technique is not something I have ever tried. Karolyn Loncon made this adorable dragon card and it just warms my heart up! I love how she embossed the shaded frame wehre the dragon sits. It is just awesome!

I really liked her background so I ended up doing the same thing. I had not used this bird stamp set as of yet, so I thought he would look great on this background.

I used Copics and remembered reading somewhere that if you shade with gray and then add red over the shading, it makes the red blending look better. I tried it and it worked. I always have a hard time blending red.

Stephanie Klauck made this awesome card using emboss resist. I did not buy this stamp set and now I am thinking I should have! Yikes, that happens to me all the time.

Well I have come to the conclusion that I do not own many solid images. I really wanted to showcase the wonderful products from My Favorite Things (as it is their challenge, you know) and I was sorely missing solid stamps. I did find some Halloween sayings that were sort of solid. It ended up working out ok. I found some Halloween sequins from Lucy so I was able to add a small pumpkin and spider. EEK!!!!

For day two we learned to make an ombre card with an ombre sentiment using the MISTI from Laurie Willison. Not only that, but she used those awesome Clarity Stamp Brushes. OMG! It made it look so easy. Now I have to buy those brushes.

Update: I did buy the brushes, but have not received them in the mail yet.

Although I wanted to try to do a word die like Laurie did, I decided to go to a totally different direction. I ended up do an ombre blue background and ombre balloons.